The present invention is related to systems and methods for reducing power consumption by semiconductor devices, and in particular to systems and methods for reducing dynamic power consumption.
A vast number of products rely on electrical circuits, and over the past two decades more and more of these products have been reduced in size and cost; and have in many cases become portable or mobile. In part because of this development, there has been a growing trend to reduce power consumption by the electrical circuits driving the products. Initially, this demand for reduced power resulted in the development of electrical circuit design types that inherently consumed less power. For example, emitter coupled logic (ECL) that originally provided high performance has become uncommon compared to complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) designs that generally provide lower performance and substantially lower power consumption for a comparable design.
In current, prevailing design techniques, power consumption is proportional to switching frequency. Thus, for example, a design that includes one million transistors switching at one megahertz will consume much less power than the same design that is switching at ten megahertz. Based on this understanding, one approach for reducing power consumption has involved reducing the amount of switching required by a design, while still maintaining a high switching frequency to avoid a reduction in performance. In some cases, this can be achieved by adding additional control signals designed to allow the same level of throughput while reducing the amount of switching necessary. In some cases, however, such an approach is impractical for signals being transferred to or from a semiconductor device due to limitation on the number of available input/output pins. As power consumed by switching of external signals may be significant, this impracticality represents a substantial impediment to power reduction.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for reducing power consumption.